Her movement startled the spiky alien looming over Elvis with its blade-like fronds. The alien flexed, seemingly doubling in size. Its tentacles, previously limp and waving like the branches of a tree, struck out like spears. This was the best view she’d had of the animal. Could it be called an animal? Perhaps not in the terrestrial sense of the word, but it was a living creature.
The spiky alien was on the other side of the mattress, directly opposite her, with Elvis lying beneath the beetles or bugs or whatever they were between them. The central mass of the creature, inside its outer barrier of scarlet tentacles and spikes, was awash with these insects. They swarmed around its body, moving in waves, pulsating like bees within a hive. She could see streams of these tiny creatures scurrying down the alien’s stiff, spiky legs and over towards Elvis.
“No,” she yelled again, losing her fear and stepping forward toward Elvis. “Get off him. Leave him alone.”
Bower began pulling handfuls of insects from his body, sweeping them away, trying to clear them from him. The insects became highly agitated. They hissed and snapped what seemed to be mandibles together, threatening to devour her.
She had to save him. She couldn’t let Elvis die, not like this. And yet, for all she knew, he was already dead.
Bower grabbed at his shoulders, trying to pull him away from the alien creature and the swarm of insects.
Hundreds of the tiny creatures began climbing up her arms, tearing at her trousers and scaling her legs, but she wouldn’t give up on Elvis, even if it meant the death of both of them. Bower staggered backwards as the insects climbed up to her face, forcing her to drop him as she fought desperately to brush them away.
The alien never moved, which surprised her. It seemed content to let these miniature assassins overpower her.
Insects clambered over the mattress.
“No,” she cried again. “Don’t you understand?”
She had Elvis by the collar and was dragging him across the mattress.
“Don’t you know? Life is too important. Life is too precious.”
Elvis was heavy. She couldn’t move him more than a few inches at a time. She was crying, sobbing.
“No. Please, leave him alone.”
The dark insect-like creatures clambered up her hair, crawling across her neck and face. She shook herself, swatting herself, knocking them from her.
With all the energy she could muster, Bower lifted Elvis, pushing off with her legs, using her thighs to drive away from the horde of insects covering the ground. She exposed his upper torso, while the sea of insects spread out around her, encircling her. And it was then she saw his arm.
Whereas before, his left arm had been severed above the elbow, the humerus bone now extended down to a bare joint, connecting to the ulna and radius bones of the forearm. The bones were wrapped in a transparent coating, a membrane of some sort. Blood pumped, lymph fluids surged in response to contracting muscles. Tendons, nerves and veins, they were all there in an anemic form, as though his was the arm of a malnourished child. The tourniquet was gone. The ragged, torn flesh from his upper arm had been knitted back into muscle and sinew. Although his bicep and triceps were thin, they had attached to tendons on the lower humerus.
“No. Please, leave him alone.”
Bower froze.
A chill ran through her.
These were her words, but she hadn’t spoken them.
“Don’t you understand? Life is too important. Life is too precious.”
Those words seemed to come from all around her. Even though she was looking at the large alien creature with its spikes and tentacles, the words repeated back at her came from no particular direction at all.
Bower released her grip on Elvis, allowing him to sink back into the swarm of alien beetles and bugs. As she did so, the creatures climbing over her dropped back to the floor and scurried away.
Stunned, she staggered backwards, tripping on the soft mattress but keeping her footing.
Bower watched as the alien creature emptied of the tiny bugs. To her surprise, there was no central mass. The scarlet spikes extended all the way to the center without forming any central bulge at all. With all the insects crawling over Elvis, the alien creature was stationary, completely still. It was then she realized what she was looking at: an empty frame, a shell. What she and everyone else had assumed was the alien was nothing more than a vehicle, a vessel. In the same way as humans used tanks, armored personnel carriers, helicopters and airplanes for transport and as weapons, the alien was using this organic contraption sitting stationary before her.
Alien or aliens? What she’d thought of as inconsequential worker bees gathering water had actually been at the heart of what she assumed was a single entity. This is what the spiky framework had wanted to protect when she held the gun. And now they were swarming over Elvis, repairing his arm.
As best she understood what she was seeing, these tiny insects were the alien intelligence. And as she watched she understood how vulnerable these creatures were in that moment, they’d committed themselves wholly to rebuilding his arm, leaving their protective weaponry standing idly by.
Bower crouched down, watching carefully. The tiny creatures were consuming the mattress, the springs within the mattress and a nearby wooden crate. Somehow, they were gathering the material they needed or converting these raw materials into what they required for their task.
Bower was speechless. For this to work, they had to be operating at a microscopic level, applying some kind of nanotechnology that allowed them to cultivate cellular growth at a radical pace. She’d been asleep for probably six or seven hours, and the results of their efforts so far were spectacular.
Were they reading his DNA and fabricating his arm in the same way humans would build a car? Or were they accelerating natural processes in some way? They had to be stimulating some kind of pluripotent cells, like stem cells. But how did they control the growth? How were they directing the appropriate response for building arteries in one area, bone in another? Get those mixed up and the results could be fatal.
Bower could see the vague outline of Elvis lying beneath the swarm. Those creatures that sat over his right arm were unusually still, whereas most of the creatures were moving around rapidly, these remained stationary. They had to be using his bilateral symmetry to guide them. Somehow they were sensing the structure of his right arm and mimicking a mirror image on the left. Bower was intrigued. Most people had arms and hands of differing sizes, with the right normally bigger than the left. She wanted to check his new arm once it was fully formed to see if that still applied, or if his new left arm was an exact mirror of the right.
Hunger pangs gnawed at her stomach, but she ignored them.
In the soft light, she left the creatures to go about their work and went to the tap for a drink of water.
On her way, she crept up behind one of the crates near the central pile of mattresses. She sat there for a few minutes listening, hidden from sight beneath the open hole. There was no one on the upper floor. She could hear movement out on the street, but not upstairs.
While getting some water, Bower peered out through the widened gap in the wooden frame. She tried pulling on the splinter of wood, and managed to enlarge her view a little.
Peering down the road, Bower could see steel beams propped up against the outside of the shutters. Adan, it seemed, was determined the alien creature would not escape.
The street beside the factory was quiet. Occasionally, she’d see a soldier walking casually down what looked more of a lane-way than a road. The building at the far end seemed to be important, and must have fronted a main road as trucks and bicycles sped by. From what she could tell, they were nowhere near where they had been taken captive. She couldn’t put her finger on why she thought that, other than that the buildings looked somehow different.